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World Peace Day - Awareness Campaign

It was the 6th of August, and there we were, by the side of the stage, waiting with bated breaths for our time to come… And come it did. It was a play consisting of scenes and messages of our own and that’s what made it even more interesting for us. It gave us an opportunity to put a little of ourselves in every scene. What really was a challenge for every one of us was to make sure the message we wanted to spread did not make the skit boring for the audience [which is not quite easy, if I may say so]. That message was not one about peace or environment. It was about both.

On World Peace Day, we wanted to spread an awareness about how the stability and health of our surrounding environment can deeply affect the inner peace within each individual, and how that could in turn cause an adverse impact on world peace. The Nobel Prize winner for peace this year was an environmentalist. It’s not possible for us to shrug our shoulders and say peace and ecology are two distinct aspects… because they aren’t. It was also about how some people didn’t believe the little things they did would make any difference in the end… and how that thought is far from right.

It was a beautiful day for it and we were certainly in the highest of spirits. With white bands on our wrists to symbolize peace and with badges pinned to our uniforms, saying ‘Jeevana’s Cool Kids Helping a Warm Planet’, we strutted around the school, with the spirit of a team which knew where it belonged and what its priorities were. It was indeed a remarkable team, comprising Naveena, Soma Sundari, Rachel, Karthiga, Anandavalli, Benita, Janani, Vidya and I.

Throughout the day, we couldn’t wait for the school to end, after which we would start on our Peace Awareness Campaign, which involved visiting various houses and distributing pamphlets and tree saplings to spread the message of ‘Trees for Peace’. The campaign was as good as we could have expected it to be. We had loads of fun, marching through the streets that we had crossed so often on our way to school, going from house to house and deciding who was supposed to speak or carry the bags. That was pure fun, the fun you have when you are confident in what you’ve chosen to do, the fun you have when you’re with people who agree with what you think is important.

When we had finished our message of white, we knew that this was a red-letter day which we would hardly forget in our lives. We observed a moment of silence in memory of the victims of wars [especially the people of Hiroshima & Nagasaki], a moment of profound silence, as we discovered the peace in our hearts. It was one of those memorable days which could always have lasted a little longer.